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Two weeks ago at sunday, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch, a regular brunch on the second sunday of every other (even) month, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. This brunch had its first half on the sun roof of our company, but it got so sunny that we couldn’t view a presentation that one of our attendees had prepared and we went inside. As usual, the main theme was that if you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. We were quite a lot of developers this time, so we had enough stuff to talk about. As usual, a lot of topics and chatter were exchanged. This recapitulation tries to highlight the main topics of the brunch, but cannot reiterate everything that was spoken. If you were there, you probably find this list inconclusive:

Open-Space offices

There are some new office buildings in town that feature the classic open-space office plan in combination with modern features like room-wide active noise cancellation. In theory, you still see your 40 to 50 collegues, but you don’t necessarily hear them. You don’t have walls and a door around you but are still separated by modern technology. In practice, that doesn’t work. The noise cancellation induces a faint cheeping in the background that causes headaches. The noise isn’t cancelled completely, especially those attention-grabbing one-sided telephone calls get through. Without noise cancellation, the room or hall is way too noisy and feels like working in a subway station.

We discussed how something like this can happen in 2016, with years and years of empirical experience with work settings. The simple truth: Everybody has individual preferences, there is no golden rule. The simple conclusion would be to provide everybody with their preferred work environment. Office plans like the combi office or the flexspace office try to provide exactly that.

Retrospective on the Git internal presentation

One of our attendees gave a conference talk about the internals of git, and sure enough, the first question of the audience was: If git relies exclusively on SHA-1 hashes and two hashes collide in the same repository, what happens? The first answer doesn’t impress any analytical mind based on logic: It’s so incredibly improbable for two SHA-1 hashes to collide that you might rather prepare yourself for the attack of wolves and lightning at the same time, because it’s more likely. But what if it happens regardless? Well, one man went out and explored the consequences. The sad result: It depends. It depends on which two git elements collide in which order. The consequences range from invisible warnings without action over silently progressing repository decay to immediate data self-destruction. The consequences are so bitter that we already researched about the savageness of the local wolve population and keep an eye on the thunderstorm app.

Helpful and funny tools

A part of our chatter contained information about new or noteworthy tools to make software development more fun. One tool is the elastic tabstop project by Nick Gravgaard. Another, maybe less helpful but more entertaining tool is the lolcommits app that takes a mugshot – oh sorry, we call that “aided selfie” now – everytime you commit code. That smug smile when you just wrote your most clever code ever? It will haunt you during a git blame session two years later while trying to find that nasty heisenbug.

Anonymous internet communication

We invested a lot of time on a topic that I will only decribe in broad terms. We discussed possibilities to communicate anonymously over a compromised network. It is possible to send hidden messages from A to B using encryption and steganography, but a compromised network will still be able to determine that a communication has occured between A and B. In order to communicate anonymously, the network must not be able to determine if a communication between A and B has happened or not, regardless of the content.

Web technology to single you out

We ended our brunch with a rather grim inspection about the possibilities to identify and track every single user in the internet. To use completely exotic means of surfing is not helpful, as explained in this xkcd comic. When using a stock browser to surf, your best practice should be to not change the initial browser window size – but just see for yourself if you think it makes a difference. Here is everything What Web Can Do Today to identify and track you. It’s so extensive, it’s really scary, but on the other hand quite useful if you happen to develop a “good” app on the web.

Epilogue

As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

For the gamers: Schneide Game Nights

Another ongoing series of events that we established at Softwareschneiderei are the Schneide Game Nights that take place at an irregular schedule. Each Schneide Game Night is a saturday night dedicated to a new or unknown computer game that is presented by a volunteer moderator. The moderator introduces the guests to the game, walks them through the initial impressions and explains the game mechanics. If suitable, the moderator plays a certain amount of time to show more advanced game concepts and gives hints and tipps without spoiling too much suprises. Then it’s up to the audience to take turns while trying the single player game or to fire up the notebooks and join a multiplayer session.

Dwarf Fortress: A simulator for everyone who is in danger to grow attached to legendary ASCII socks (if that doesn’t make much sense now, lets try: A simulator for everyone who loves to dig his own grave).

Minecraft: A simulator for everyone who never grew out of the LEGO phase and is still scared in the dark. Also, the floor is lava.

TIS-100: A simulator (sort of) for everyone who thinks programming in Assembler is fun. Might soon be an olympic discipline.

Faster Than Light: A roguelike for everyone who wants more space combat action than Kerbal Space Program can provide and nearly as much text as in Dwarf Fortress.

Don’t Starve: A brutal survival game in a cute comic style for everyone who isn’t scared in the dark and likes to hunt Gobblers.

Papers, Please: A brutal survival game about a bureaucratic hero in his border guard booth. Avoid if you like to follow the rules.

This War of Mine: A brutal survival game about civilians in a warzone, trying not to simultaneously lose their lives and humanity.

Crypt of the Necrodancer: A roguelike for everyone who wants to literally play the vibes, trying to defeat hordes of monsters without skipping a beat.

Undertale: A 8-bit adventure for everyone who fancies silly jokes and weird storytelling. You’ll feel at home if you’ve played the NES.

The Schneide Game Nights are scheduled over the same mailing list as the Dev Brunches and feature the traditional pizza break with nearly as much chatter as the brunches. The next Game Night will be about:

Factorio: A simulator that puts automation first. Massive automation. Like, don’t even think about doing something yourself, let the robots do it a million times for you.

In mid-december, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch, a regular brunch on a sunday, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. If you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. The brunch was well-attended and we didn’t even think about using the roof garden (cold and rainy). There were lots of topics and chatter. As always, this recapitulation tries to highlight the main topics of the brunch, but cannot reiterate everything that was spoken. If you were there, you probably find this list inconclusive:

International brunch

We tried to establish a video conference with a guest from San Francisco and had tried the technical implementation beforehands. But we didn’t succeed, mostly because of a sudden christmas party on the USA side. So we can’t really say if the brunch character is preserved even if you join us in the middle of the (local) night.

How much inheritance do you use?

One question was how inheritance is used in the initial development of systems. Is it a pre-planned design feature or something that helps to resolve difficult programming situations in an ad-hoc manner? How deep are the inheritance levels?
The main response was that inheritance is seldom used upfront. The initial implementations are mostly free of class hierarchies. Inheritance is often used after the fact to extract abstractions (or generalizations) from the code. The hierarchies mostly grow “upwards” from the concrete level to abstract superclasses.
Another use case of inheritance is the handling of special cases with further specialization through subclasses. The initial class is modified just enough to enable proper insertion of the new code in its own subclass.
A third use case of inheritance, upfront this time, was proposed in regard of the domain model. Behavioural typing is a common motivation for the usage of inheritance in the model, as contrasted to the technical usage of inheritance to solve non-domain problems. In the domain level, inheritance resembling a “behaves-like” relation can be the most powerful expression of actual connections between types.

Book review “Analysis patterns”

The discussion about inheritance led to questions about domain models and their expression through formal notation. An example about accounts resulted in a short review of the book “Analysis Patterns”, written by Martin Fowler in 1999. The book introduces its own notation for models to be able to express the interrelations without being dragged down into the implementation level. UML isn’t suited as it’s a notation from the technical domain. Overall, the book seems to be mostly overlooked and under-appreciated. It contains a lot of valueable wisdom in the area of domain analysis, an activity that has to be done upfront of any larger project. This “upfront activity” characteristics might have led to it being ignored in most agile processes. The book is a perfect companion to Eric Evan’s “Domain-Driven Design”.

Book review “Agile!”

Another book review of this brunch was a deep review of Bertrand Meyer’s book “Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly”. The book is the written opinion of Mr. Meyer in regard of all current agile processes and very polarizing as such – he does state his points clearly. But it’s also a very well-researched assessment of nearly all aspects of agile software development. You might want to argue with certain conclusions, but you’ll have to admit that Mr. Meyer knows what he’s talking about and got his facts right (even if his temper shines through sometimes). This book is the perfect companion to all the major agile books you’ve read. It serves as a counter-balance to the dogmatic views that sometimes come across. And it serves as a (albeit personal) rating of all agile practices, a gold mine for every project manager out there. the book itself is rather short with some reiterations (you’ll get the major points, even if you skip some pages) and written in an informal tone, so it’s an easy read as long as you’re neutral towards the topic.
When we reviewed the rating of agile practices on a big whiteboard, ranging from ugly to brilliant, it didn’t took long until discussions started. If nothing else, this book will help you review your practices and beliefs.

Embedded Agile on the rise

The next topic was related to agile software development, too. In the large field of embedded software development, adoption of agile practices lagged behind substantially. This has many reasons, of which we discussed a few, but the more interesting trend was that this changes. While there is still a considerable lack of literature for embedded software overall, the number of publications advocating modifications to the agile processes to fit the intricacies of embedded software development is steadily increasing.
A similar trend can be observed in the user experience community (think: user interface designers), termed “lean UX“.

Mobile game presentation

A long-awaited highlight of this brunch was the presentation of a mobile platforms game under development by one attendee. It’s a cool-looking Jump-and-Run game in the tradition of Super Mario, with lots of gimmicks and innovative effects. The best part of the presentation was the gameplay, controlled by the developer from behind the device, upside down and with live commentary. The game is developed in a platform-agnostic manner using several frameworks and suitable coding habits. Right now, it’s in its final phase of development and will be released soon. I don’t want to spoil too much beforehands and invite Martin (the author) to insert a comment below with links leading to more information.

A change in the Dev Brunch mechanics

The last topic on our agenda was a short review of the Dev Brunch series in the last years. In 2013, we introduced the extra “workshop events” that were adapted to the “game nights” in 2014. We want to return to more serious topics in 2015 and revive the workshops. Attendees (and future ones) are invited to make suggestions which workshop they would like to see. The Dev Brunch itself will be formalized further by introducing a steady pace of bi-monthly dates.

Epilogue

As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Yesterday, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch, a regular brunch on a sunday, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. If you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. The brunch was well-attended this time but the weather didn’t allow for an outside session. There were lots of topics and chatter. As always, this recapitulation tries to highlight the main topics of the brunch, but cannot reiterate everything that was spoken. If you were there, you probably find this list inconclusive:

Docker – the new (hot) kid in town

Docker is the hottest topic in software commissioning this year. It’s a lightweight virtualization technology, except that you don’t obtain full virtual machines. It’s somewhere between a full virtual machine and a simple chroot (change root). And it’s still not recommended for production usage, but is already in action in this role in many organizations.
We talked about the magic of git and the UnionFS that lay beneath the surface, the ease of migration and disposal and even the relative painlessness to run it on Windows. I can earnestly say that Docker is the technology that everyone will have had a look at before the year is over. We at the Softwareschneiderei run an internal Docker workshop in September to make sure this statement holds true for us.

Git – the genius guy with issues

The discussion changed over to Git, the distributed version control system that supports every versioning scheme you can think of but won’t help you if you entangle yourself in the tripwires of your good intentions. Especially the surrounding tooling was of interest. Our attendees had experience with SmartGit and Sourcetree, both capable of awesome dangerous stuff like partial commmits and excessive branching. We discovered a lot of different work styles with Git and can agree that Git supports them all.
When we mentioned code review tools, we discovered a widespread suspiciousness of heavy-handed approaches like Gerrit. There seems to be an underlying motivational tendency to utilize reviews to foster a culture of command and control. On a technical level, Gerrit probably messes with your branching strategy in a non-pleasant way.

Teamwork – the pathological killer

We had a long and deep discussion about teamwork, liability and conflicts. I cannot reiterate everything, but give a few pointers how the discussion went. There is a common litmus test about shared responsibility – the “hold the line” mindset. Every big problem is a problem of the whole team, not the poor guy that caused it. If your ONOZ lamp lights up and nobody cares because “they didn’t commit anything recently”, you just learned something about your team.
Conflicts are inevitable in every group of people larger than one. We talked about team dynamics and how most conflicts grow over long periods only to erupt in a sudden and painful way. We worked out that most people aren’t aware of their own behaviour and cannot act “better”, even if they were. We learned about the technique of self-distancing to gain insights about one’s own feelings and emotional drive. Two books got mentioned that may support this area: “How to Cure a Fanatic” by Amos Oz and “On Liberty” from John Stuart Mill. Just a disclaimer: the discussion was long and the books most likely don’t match the few headlines mentioned here exactly.

Code Contracts – the potential love affair

An observation of one attendee was a starting point for the next topic: (unit) tests as a mean for spot checks don’t exactly lead to the goal of full confidence over the code. The explicit declaration of invariants and subsequent verification of those invariants seem to be more likely to fulfil the confidence-giving role.
Turns out, another attendee just happened to be part of a discussion on “next generation verification tools” and invariant checking frameworks were one major topic. Especially the library Code Contracts from Microsoft showed impressive potential to really be beneficial in a day-to-day setting. Neat features like continuous verification in the IDE and automatic (smart) correction proposals makes this approach really stand out. This video and this live presentation will provide more information.

While this works well in the “easy” area of VM-based languages like C#, the classical C/C++ ecosystem proves to be a tougher nut to crack. The common approach is to limit the scope of the tools to the area covered by LLVM, a widespread intermediate representation of source code.

Visual Studio – the merchant nobody likes but everybody visits

One attendee asked about realistic alternatives to Visual Studio for C++ development. Turns out, there aren’t many, at least not free of charge. Most editors and IDEs aren’t particularly bad, but lack the “everything already in the box” effect that Visual Studio provides for Windows-/Microsoft-only development. The main favorites were Sublime Text with clang plugin, Orwell Dev-C++ (the fork from Bloodshed C++), Eclipse CDT (if the code assist failure isn’t important), Code::Blocks and Codelite. Of course, the classics like vim or emacs (with highly personalized plugins and setup) were mentioned, too. KDevelop and XCode were non-Windows platform-based alternatives, too.

Stinky Board – the nerdy doormat

One attendee experiments with input devices that might improve the interaction with computers. The Stinky Board is a foot-controlled device with four switches that act like additional keys. In comparison to other foot switches, it’s very sturdy. The main use case from our attendee are keys that you need to keep pressed for their effect, like “sprint” or “track enemy” in computer games. In a work scenario, there are fewer of these situations. The additional buttons may serve for actions that are needed relatively infrequently, but regularly – like “run project”.

This presentation produced a lot of new suggestions, like the Bragi smart headphones, which include sensors for head gestures. Imagine you shaking your head for “undo change” or nod for “run tests” – while listening to your fanciest tunes (you might want to refrain from headbanging then). A very interesting attempt to combine mouse, keyboard and joystick is the “King’s Assembly“, a weird two-piece device that’s just too cool not to mention. We are looking forward to hear more from it.

Epilogue

As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The high number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Yesterday, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch at last. The Dev Brunch is a regular brunch on a sunday, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. If you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. The brunch was very well-attended this time. We had bright sunny weather and used our roof garden to catch some sunrays. There were lots of topics and chatter. As always, this recapitulation tries to highlight the main topics of the brunch, but cannot reiterate everything that was spoken. If you were there, you probably find this list inconclusive:

Home office in another time zone

One of our attendees is preparing to leave Germany for at least one year to work in another timezone one the same projects. He gave a quick overview about the setup and some considerations. The team is used to distributed, multi-timezone work, but will now span the whole scala of it. We are eager to have a first-hand report about how it all plays out and sad that we will not see him for quite a time in person. (Personal note: I will miss the developer beer meetings we held infrequently)

XP 2014 conference in Rome

Another one of our attendees just came back from the XP 2014 conference in Rome, still hungover. She reported a lot of impressions and single bits of insights impromptu and will work up a more refined talk for the next brunch. One thing that seems like a really good idea is the “Stop Work Authority Card”. Basically, it’s a card you can hold up like a referee in a sports match to clearly state that the safety of some of your most valueable assets is compromised or risking to be. You have the obligation to play the card if you perceive such a threat and the (temporary) authority to remove it or have it removed.

The idea of “safety” (in non-hazardous or friendly) was a big theme at the conference. The claim that “safety is the prerequisite of excellence” stood out.

The XP 2014 conference was a small one, but visited by insiders from all over the world. It certainly sparked a lot of ideas and food for thought. We are looking forward for the report at the next Dev Brunch.

Is TDD dead?

A most recent discussion we at the Softwareschneiderei follow with great interest is the debate around David Heinemeier Hansson’s frontal attack on the hype around Test Driven Development. There are lots of blog posts to read, some better, some not so much. But an highlight is probably the video chat series between Kent Beck (inventor of TDD), Martin Fowler (general loudmouth, here in a rather quiet role as a moderator) and David Heinemeier Hansson (general firestarter). And while the topic is hot and the discussion fresh, we soon deviated from the main questions and explored the state of art how knowledge and experience is transported in our profession. We concluded that while we all dislike populism, it’s an effective tool to transport messages (with the downside of losing nuances on the way).

Continuous improvement

One attendee asked about good ways to improve his skill and craft. Besides the obvious answers (sleep less, train more, read a lot), there were quite a few ideas. One source of inspiration could be “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”, a documentary movie about a famous sushi master and his quest to perfect the art of sushi (yes, the little snacks that are delicious even without mastery). The concept of “better every day, but never good enough” was identified to be prone to perfectionism, a trait often found in masters of their field, but probably not the most economically sound one. The author of this blog post wrote about his approach to professional passion three years ago.

Radical table

We agreed to consider our little discussion group “the radical table” because we don’t shy away from argueing in the extremes to get our messages across. This all was mentioned in good spirits and without personal insults. But if you read about the “radical table manifesto” some point in the future, don’t be surprised. It might include a plea to Uncle Bob to never give up his style to deliver keynotes and talks even if we don’t attend it twice.

Start-up software tools

In the end of the brunch, we split into several smaller groups to discuss more specific topics of personal interest. I can’t report for the talks I didn’t attend, but joined a discussion about recommendable and necessary tools for a software development start-up company. Some tools that were given included OpenERP, JIRA (including the whole Atlassian portfolio), FogBugz, Microsoft Office 365 and CAS Genesis World.

One controversial topic was the importance of integration (as in “one tool for everything”) versus requirement matching (as in “does exactly what we want”). Related was the topic of “plan ahead” versus “change tools mid-flight”. If you have experience with these questions, please leave a comment.

Epilogue

As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The high number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Yes, you’ve read it right in the title. The Dev Brunch I want to summarize now is over two month ago. The long delay can only partially be explained by several prolonged periods of illness on my side. So this will be a rather crisp summary, because all the lively details have probably vanished by now. But let me start by explaining what the Dev Brunch is:
The Dev Brunch is a regular brunch on a sunday, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. If you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. This brunch was very well-attended, but we still managed to sit around our main table. Let’s have a look at the main topics we discussed:

XFD presentation

In a presentation of a large german software company, our Extreme Feedback Devices were thoroughly mentioned. We found it noteworthy enough to mention it here.

Industrial Logic’s XP Playing Cards

This is just a deck of playing cards, but not the usual one. One hundred different cards with problems, solutions and values wait for you to make up some game rules and start to play. The inventors have collected a list of possible games on their website. It leads to hilarious results if you just distribute some cards in a group of developers (as we did on the brunch) and start with a problem. Soon enough, your discussion will lead you to the most unexpected topics. We ended with the “Power Distance Index“, but I have no recollection how we got there. These cards are a great facilitator to start technical discussions. They seem to be non-available now, sadly.

Distributed SCRUM

A short report on applying SCRUM to a multi-site team, using desktop sharing and video chat software. The project landscape is driven by an adaption of “scrum of scrums”. I cannot dive into details anymore, but these reports are a great reason to really attend the brunch instead of just reading the summary. The video chat meetings were crucial for team-building, but very time-consuming and wearying due to timezone reasons.

SCRUM User Group Karlsruhe

Speaking of SCRUM, there is a SCRUM User Group in our city, Karlsruhe in Germany. It might not be the biggest user group ever, but one attendant of our brunch reported that all participants are “socially very pleasing”. There are very interesting presentations or gatherings for specific topics. If you have to deal with SCRUM, this should be on your agends.

Retrospectives

We had a prolonged talk about retrospectives and how to apply them. Most retrospective activities tend to be formalized (like “cards and priorities”) and lose effectiveness due to the “comfort aspect”. A hypothesis during the talks was that when moderation isn’t necessary anymore, its more likely to be a negative smell. We talked about moderated vs. non-moderated retrospectives quite a bit, also exploring the question what role should/could be moderator and why. The “Happiness Metric” was mentioned, specifically its application by the swedish company Crisp, as described by Henrik Kniberg. Some sources of ideas for retrospectives were also mentioned: the Facilitator Gathering or some noteworthy books that I forgot to write down (sorry! Please ask for them in the comments).

Internal facilitator

We also discussed some problems that “internal” facilitators face day-to-day. Internal facilitators work within the team they try to facilitate.

Presentation about acceptance testing by Uncle Bob

A big event in February this year were the workshops and the presentation with Robert C. Martin about testing. His talk presented Fitnesse in the context of acceptance testing. There was some confusion about the amount of available seats, so most of us didn’t attend (because we weren’t able to register beforehands). Some of our participants were there, nonetheless and found the presentation worthwile. Only the usual pattern of Uncle Bob’s presentation lacked some virtue this time, but this can easily explained with the flu. Here’s an external summary of the event. Check out the comment section for potential first-hand accounts.

Book about money counterfeiter

Somehow, I’ve written down a notice about a german book about a famous money counterfeiter, Jürgen Kuhl: “Blütenträume”. This talented artist drew dollar notes by hand so perfectly that even experts couldn’t tell them apart. Regrettably, I don’t remember the context anymore. It might have something to do with Giesecke & Devrient, a manufacturer of money printing machines. But even then, I don’t remember what that context was about.

Traceability of software artifacts

Our last topic circled around the question how software artifacts are registered and traced in our practice. The interesting part of this question is the ability to make connections between different artifacts, like an automatic report about what existing features are tangented by a change and should be tested again (if manual tests are necessary). Or you want to record the specifics of your test environment alongside your tests. Perhaps you are interested in the relation between features and their accompanying tests. The easiest connection can be made between a change (commit) and the issue it belongs to. But changes without issue (like almost all refactorings) are problematic still. It was an interesting discussion with a lot input to think about.

Summary

One thing I’ve learnt from this Dev Brunch is that it isn’t enough to write down some notes and try to remember the details some weeks later. The summaries have to be written in a timely manner. I didn’t succeed with it this time and try to blame it on my lack of health. I promise a better summary next time. The worst part is that I know that I’ve forgotten a lot of important or interesting details (like a youtube channel about ideas – please provide the link in the comment section, Martin!) but cannot recreate the memories.

As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The high number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

Yesterday, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch. The Dev Brunch is a regular brunch on a sunday, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. If you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. The brunch had less participants this time, but didn’t lack topics. Let’s have a look at the main topics we discussed:

Sharing code between projects

The first topic emerged from our initial general chatter. What’s a reasonable and praticable approach to share code between software entities (different projects, product editions, versions, etc.). We discussed at least three different solutions that are known to us in practice:

Main branch with customer forks: This was the easiest approach to explain. A product has a main branch where all the new features are committed to. Everytime a customer wants his version, a new branch is created from the most current version on the main branch. The customer may require some changes and a lot of bug fixes, but all of that is done on the customer’s branch. Sometimes, a critical bug fix is merged back into the main branch, but no change from the main branch is transferred to the customer’s branch ever. Basically, the customer version of the code is “frozen” in terms of features and updates. This works well in its context because the main branch already contains the software every customer wants and no customer wants to update to a version with more features – this would be another additional branch.

Big blob of conditionals: This approach needs a bit more explanation. Once, there was a software product ready to be sold. Every customer had some change requests and special requirements. All these changes and special-cases were added to the original code base, using customer IDs and a whole lot of if-else statements to separate the changes from each customer. All customers always get the same code, but their unique customer ID only passes the guard clauses that are required for them. All the changes of all the other customers are deactivated at runtime. With this approach, the union of all features is always represented in the source code.

Project-as-an-universe: This approach defines projects as little universes without intersection. Every project stands for its own and only shares code with other projects by means of copy and paste. When a new project is started, some subset of classes of another project is chosen as a starting point and transformed to fit the requirements. There is no “master universe” or main branch for the shared classes. The same class may evolve differently (and conflicting) in different projects. This approach probably isn’t suited for a software product, but is applied to individual projects with different requirements.

We are aware of and discussed even approaches, but not with the profound knowledge of several years first-hand experience. The term OSGi was often used as a reference in the discussion. We were able to exhibit the motivation, advantages and shortcomings of each approach. It was very interesting to see that even slightly different prerequisites may lead to fundamentally different solutions.

Book (p)review: Practical API Design

In the book “Practical API Design” by Jaroslav Tunach, the founder of the NetBeans Platform and initial “architect” of its API talks about his lessons learnt when evolving a substantial API for over ten years. The book begins with a theory on values and motivations for good API design. We get a primer why APIs are needed and essential for modern software development. We learn what are the essential characteristics of a good API. The most important message here is that a good API isn’t necessarily “beautiful”. This caused a bit of discussion among us, so that the topic strayed a bit from the review characteristic. Well, that’s what the Dev Brunch is for – we aren’t a lecture session. One interesting discussion trail led us to the aestethics in music theory.
But to give a summary on the first chapters of the book: Good stuff! Jaroslav Tunach makes some statements worthy of discussion, but he definitely knows what he’s talking about. Some insights were eye-openers or at least thought-provokers for our reader. If the rest of the book holds to the quality of the first chapters, then you shouldn’t hesitate to add it to your reading queue.

Effective electronic archive

One of our participants has developed a habit to archivate most things electronically. He already blogged about his experiences:

Both blog entries hold quite a lot of useful information. We discussed some possibilities to implement different archivation strategies. Evernote was mentioned often in the discussion, diigo was named as the better delicious, Remember The Milk as a task/notification service and Google Gmail as an example to rely solely on tags. Tags were a big topic in our discussion, too. It was mentioned that Confluence has the ability to add multiple tags to an article. Thunderbird was mentioned, especially in the combination of tags and virtual folders. And a noteworthy podcast of Scott Hanselmann on the topic of “Getting Things Done” was pointed out, too.

Schneide Events 2013

We performed a short survey about different special events and workshops that may happen in 2013 in the Softwareschneiderei. If you already are registered on our Dev Brunch list, you’ll receive the invitations for all events shortly. Here is a short primer on what we’re planning:

Communication Through Test workshop

Refactoring Golf

API Design Fest

Google Gruyere Day

Introduction to Dwarf Fortress

Some of these events are more related to software engineering than others, but all of them try to be fun first, lessons later. Participate if you are interested!

Learning programming languages

The last main topic of the brunch was a short, rather disappointed review of the book “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks” by Bruce Tate. The best part of the book, according to our reviewer, were the interview sections with the language designers. And because he got interested in this kind of approach to a programming language, he dug up some similar content:

Coders at Work – another book with interviews, not only with language designers

The Computerworld interviews are directly accessible and contain some pearls of wisdom and humour (and some slight inaccuracies). Highly recommended reading if you want to know not only about the language, but also about the context (and mindset) in which it was created.

Epilogue

As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The high number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.

This summary is a bit late and my only excuse it that the recent weeks were packed with action. But the good news is: The Schneide Dev Brunch is still alive and gaining traction with an impressive number of participants for the most recent event. The Schneide Dev Brunch is a regular brunch in that you gather together to have a late breakfast or early dinner on a sunday, only that all attendees want to talk about software development (and various other topics). If you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. We were able to sit in the sun on our roofgarden and enjoy the first warm spring weekend.

We had to do introductory rounds because there were quite some new participants this time. And they brought good topics and insights with them. Let’s have a look at the topics we discussed:

Checker Framework

This isn’t your regular java framework, meant to reside alongside all the other jar files in your dependency folder. The Checker framework enhances java’s type system with “pluggable types”. You have to integrate it in your runtime, your compiler and your IDE to gain best results, but after that you’re nothing less than a superhero among regulars. Imagine pluggable types as additional layers to your class hierarchy, but in the z-axis. You’ll have multiple layers of type hierachies and can include them into your code to aid your programming tasks. A typical use case is the compiler-based null checking ability, while something like Perl’s taint mode is just around the corner.

But, as our speaker pointed out, after a while the rough edges of the framework will show up. It still is somewhat academic and lacks integration sometimes. It’s a great help until it eventually becomes a burden.

Hearing about the Checker framework left us excited to try it sometimes. At least, it’s impressive to see what you can do with a little tweaking at the compiler level.

Getting Stuck

A blog entry by Jeff Wofford inspired one of us to talk about the notion of “being stuck” in software development. Jeff Wofford himself wrote a sequel to the blog entry, differentiating four kinds of stuck. We could relate to the concept and have seen it in the wild before. The notion of “yak shaving” entered the discussion soon. In summary, we discussed the different types of being stuck and getting stuck and what we think about it. While there was no definite result, everyone could take away some insight from the debate.

Zen to Done

One topic was a review of the Zen to Done book on self-organization and productivity improvement. The methodology can be compared to “Getting Things Done“, but is easier to begin with. It defines a bunch of positive habits to try and establish in your everyday life. Once you’ve tried them all, you probably know what works best for you and what just doesn’t resonate at all. On a conceptional level, you can compare Zen to Done to the Clean Code Developer, both implementing the approach of “little steps” and continuous improvement. Very interesting and readily available for your own surveying. There even exists a german translation of the book.

Book: Making software

The book “Making software” is a collection of essays from experienced developers, managers and scientists describing the habits, beliefs and fallacies of modern software development. Typical for a book from many different authors is the wide range of topics and different quality levels in terms of content, style and originality. The book gets a recommendation because there should be some interesting reads for everyone inside. One essay was particularly interesting for the reviewer: “How effective is Test-Driven Development?” by Burak Turhan and others. The article treats TDD like a medicine in a clinical trial, trying to determine the primary effects, the most effective dosage and the unwanted side effects. Great fun for every open-minded developer and the origin of a little joke: If there was a pill you could take to improve your testing, would a placebo pill work, too?

Book: Continuous Delivery

This book is the starting point of this year’s hype: “Continuous Delivery” by Jez Humble and others. Does it live up to the hype? In the opinion of our reviewer: yes, mostly. It’s a solid description of all the practices and techniques that followed continuous integration. The Clean Code Developer listed them as “Continuous Integration II” until the book appeared and gave them a name. The book is a highly recommened read for the next years. Hopefully, the practices become state-of-the-art for most projects in the near future, just like it went with CI. The book has a lot of content but doesn’t shy away from repetition, too. You should read it in one piece, because later chapters tend to refer to earlier content quite often.

Epilogue

This Dev Brunch was a lot of fun and had a lot more content than listed here. Some of us even got sunburnt by the first real sunny weather this year. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.